Tunnel Beach

To Te Anau, New Zealand

The sunny weather continued this morning. Meg and De Ann walked to the corner for coffee while I went for a run. The big event of the day was our visit to Tunnel Beach. We debated either going to the Larnach Castle or the Dunedin Botanical Garden but ended up going for a walk to enjoy the sunshine, which we had missed out on our first few days.

It was a lovely walk down a steep path to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. The sandstone cliffs sculpted by the waves and wind formed a long archway or tunnel over the ocean. However, the name Tunnel Beach was actually due to a small man made tunnel that led through the cliff to the isolated beach.

Afterwards, we had an excellent lunch in town thanks to De Ann. Then a beautiful but long drive to Te Anau. We continually exclaimed how gorgeous the landscape was with the patchwork of green and gold fields and rows of pines and poplars forming giant wind breaks along the fence line. Today we saw more sheep than ever, but also dozens of deer farms. We had no idea that venison was so popular.

We arrived a bit after 8:00 and found a campground. The small tourist town was unexpectedly full of tourists, a large percentage of which appeared to be Chinese. The kids were dying to play in the town playground, so the adults found a campground and then returned with a half drunk bottle of wine. Eventually, the crowd at the cool zip line died down giving us all a chance. Even Meg and De Ann joined in for some family zip line relay races.

Since De Ann is a captive audience, we forced her to play a card game call "Poohead" that we learned in Nepal. I'm pretty sure she thought we were just making up the rules as we went, especially with a couple of glasses of wine in her. In the end though Kylie and Dex had a spat so the game abruptly ended, so we were all pooheads!